Posts Tagged ‘film’

I cited Andrew O’Heir’s critical review of Boom Bust Boom, Terry Jones and Theo Kocken’s Monty Pythonesque documentary about the crash of 2007-08 back in March but I hadn’t seen the film itself until last night.

In many ways, I wish I hadn’t.

Oh, sure, there are a couple of good moments. Introducing the work of Hyman Minsky to a larger audience. A cameo by John Cusack, who suggests that economics students should pelt their professors with vegetables and rotten fruit if they continue to parrot the party line. “Maybe urinate on them. That’s what I would do.” And some well-deserved attention to the students in the Post-Crash Economics Society at the University of Manchester.

But otherwise, the film is just not very good. For starters, consider the fact that, after the worst crisis of capitalism since the first Great Depression, only once is capitalism itself even mentioned!

Then, as O’Heir wrote, there’s not a single mention of John Maynard Keynes (who published his General Theory in 1936, in the midst of the earlier depression), let alone Karl Marx (who, along with Friedrich Engels, was writing about capitalism’s crisis tendencies in the middle of the nineteenth century). Since Jones and Kocken decided to make forgetting a central part of their story—especially failing to remember and draw lessons from previous financial crises—they might also have mentioned the deliberate forgetting by mainstream economists and economic policymakers of other economic ideas, now as in the past.

And, in this day and age, it smacks viewers in the face that, as Shane Ferro wrote, “Women and minorities are almost entirely left out of this film—not unlike the way they’ve been left out of financial and economics professions.” The only two expert women the movie manages to feature are Lucy Prebble, a playwright who once wrote a play about the collapse of Enron, and Laurie Santos, a Yale psychology professor who studies how monkeys make decisions. Neither, as it turns out, has a background in economics, or much knowledge of capitalism, its history, or the 2007-08 crash.*

But the worst part of this high-budget, cleverly animated documentary is the actual story Terry and Kocken decided to tell. What it boils down to is this: financial crises have always been with us (at least since Tulip Mania in the 1630s), people tend to make irrational decisions (e.g, by forgetting about previous crises and taking on too much risk), and making irrational decisions is part of our human nature, as determined by evolutionary behavioral psychology (hence the monkeys).

Actually, the film is more confused than that. At one point, it features Minsky (in an animated dialogue with his son)—and, if it had continued in that vein, it would have been able to reveal something about the financial fragility inherent in the regular boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism (since the key actors in Minsky’s approach are capitalist enterprises and banks). But then Minksy is dropped and the filmmakers decide to go in a different direction, with a fanciful discussion of human nature (continuing an approach that, from the beginning, features an undifferentiated “we” who is responsible for speculation, risk-taking, euphoria, forgetting, and so on) and then an attempt to ground human nature in primate behavior (this after criticizing the scientistic pretensions of neoclassical economics).

There’s no attempt to identify the dynamics of a particular economic system, which we usually refer to as capitalism. No attempt to identify particular and differentiated actors and institutions within capitalism, such as bankers, workers, consumers, politicians, enterprises, financial markets, and so on. No references to other countries today, in addition to the United States and the United Kingdom. No mention of the grotesques levels of inequality in the lead-up to the crash, and no discussion of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, and so on after the crash.

Instead, what we are presented with is a succession of financial crises, which in the end are grounded in our singular human nature.

That, to say the least, is not a particularly insightful analysis of the causes and consequences of the crash. And the best the filmmakers and the various talking heads can come up with by way of policies is the need, since human nature can’t be changed, to regulate the financial system (perhaps, at its most adventurous, by restoring Glass-Steagal barriers between commercial and investment banking) to keep “us” from making the same mistakes.

To which we can all respond: “Been there, done that. Now let’s try something that might actually work, beginning with the inherent instabilities of capitalism itself.”

Like this:

Regular readers of this blog know that I take seriously the idea that representations of the economy are regularly produced and disseminated in many different forms and social sites. They are generated, of course, within the discipline of economics as well as by official (degreed) economists in think tanks, financial institutions, the media, and elsewhere. But, I argue, economic representations are also created and circulate outside economics—in a kind of Bakhtinian carnival—in academic departments other than economics (from anthropology to cultural studies) and outside the academy itself (in painting, film, graffiti, music, cartoons, and so on).

Some of these alternative economic representations I’m aware of. But there are many others I’m not. One of them showed up in a recent piece on “Feeling Let Down and Left Behind, With Little Hope for Better,” on the role of an e-cigarette shop in Wilkes County, North Carolina.

Lonnie Ramsay, 45, walked in looking for help. He described a nasty falling-out with his girlfriend and said he just wanted to get home to a nearby city. But he only had $25 to his name. He said he had been making $10 an hour at a factory.

One Friday afternoon someone brought a pair of virtual reality goggles hooked up to a laptop to the shop. Mr. Foster exhaled a cloud that smelled like a Popsicle. He said he had been reading up on the idea, explored in the “Zeitgeist” movie, of a “resource-based economy” — a system in which, he said, “There’s no money and everything is controlled by computers and resources are equally distributed and there’s no ownership or anything like that.”

“The system we have now is going to collapse,” he said. “And technology, the automation process, is going to keep taking over and over.”

That, he said, would free up people to do what they wanted.

Chris Lentz, 36, a worker for a utility company in a pair of mud-caked boots, frowned and asked, “If people were just given everything they ever needed, then what’s the point of going to work?”

And so it went: the thick, sweet haze; the frustrations, diversions and digital toys; and the sense, in this jagged, hyperconnected moment, that everything is possible, or nothing is.

The essay itself is a representation of the economy—of an America riddled with economic anxieties, based on the “Fear that an honest, 40-hour working-class job can no longer pay the bills.”

And then, in the midst of that representation, there’s another: a reference to the Zeitgeist film series, especially (I am guessing by the quotations) the second film, Zeitgeist: Addendum from 2008. It was produced and directed by Peter Joseph, as a sequel to the 2007 film, Zeitgeist: The Movie. (There’s a third installment, Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, which premiered in 2011.)

What I find interesting about the film is less the conspiracy-driven analysis of the monetary system and the Federal Reserve (although there’s a certain validity to the idea that people are forced to have the freedom to sell their ability to work in order to pay off their debt) than the argument that capitalism perpetuates the conditions it claims to address and that it’s possible to imagine a different economy, one that puts environmental friendliness, sustainability, and abundance as fundamental economic and social goals. Zeitgeist offers a particular representation of the economy as it is and how it can be made better, in a manner that runs directly counter to the representations offered by most official economists in the United States.

That and the fact that the film has been viewed on Youtube over half a million times.

Like this:

Blood-sucking vampires are, of course, ubiquitous in contemporary film—from Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre to Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (the most recent in a long line that stretches back through Christopher Lee’s various portrayals of the Transylvanian vampire to the 1909 silent film Vampire of the Coast).

Vampires are also, as it turns out, familiar as a critical trope within economics.

Terrell Carver (in Postmodern Marx) notes that Marx used the vampire motif three times in Capital—in the chapter on the working day:

“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

“The prolongation of the working-day beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night, only acts as a palliative. It quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour.”

“The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no ‘free agent,’ that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him ‘so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited’.”

As Carver explains, “Marx did not accept a commonplace distinction between literal and figurative language, and he did not attempt to avoid the latter in what is taken to be his most scientific work.” Why?

Marx’s critique takes political economy as a textual surface, and by means of a thorough, and thoroughly linguistic analysis he refigures, in a parodic text, a supposedly familiar and uncontentious world as strange (requiring explanation) and problematic (requiring political action).

A more recent example is Matt Taibbi’s reference to Goldman Sachs as “A great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

And now we have Pope Francis calling the people who take advantage of the poor “true bloodsuckers” who “live by spilling the blood of the people who they make slaves of labour.”*

When riches are created by exploiting the people, by those rich people who exploit [others], they take advantage of the work of the people, and those poor people become slaves. We think of the here and now, the same thing happens all over the world. “I want to work.” “Good, they’ll make you a contract, from September to June.” Without a pension, without health care… Then they suspend it, and in July and August they have to eat air. And in September, they laugh at you about it. Those who do that are true bloodsuckers, and they live by spilling the blood of the people who they make slaves of labour.

Vampires are central, then, to the ruthless criticism of mainstream economics, a critique that makes the supposedly common-sense world in which we live—the world of capitalist commodities and wage-slavery—both strange and ripe for fundamental change.

*The pope’s reference is to the reading for 19 May 2016, from James 5:

Come now, you rich, weep and wail over your impending miseries.
Your wealth has rotted away, your clothes have become moth-eaten,
your gold and silver have corroded,
and that corrosion will be a testimony against you;
it will devour your flesh like a fire.
You have stored up treasure for the last days.
Behold, the wages you withheld from the workers
who harvested your fields are crying aloud;
and the cries of the harvesters
have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.
You have lived on earth in luxury and pleasure;
you have fattened your hearts for the day of slaughter.
You have condemned;
you have murdered the righteous one;
he offers you no resistance.

Like this:

I happened to see Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane the other night and immediately noticed the parallels between the quintessential American saga about a giant who brings ruin to all and the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump—from the inherited wealth and the creation of an empire to the desire to be seen as the defender of “the workingman” and the retreat to an opulent Florida palace.

Why, I asked myself, had no one else made the connection to Citizen Trump?

Well, as it turns out, they have. Chris Matthews, in a clear attempt to grab some ratings, created a four-part series titled Citizen Trump back in December (here’s the link to part 4).

even though a scandal proves Kane’s immediate undoing, the film makes clear that his political aspirations were ill fated from the start. After the returns come in, Kane receives a visit from Jed Leland (Joseph Cotten), his old friend and surrogate conscience. In spite (or perhaps because of) being plastered, Leland cuts to the heart of Kane’s misplaced ambition:

“You talk about the people as though you owned them … As long as I can remember, you’ve talked about giving the people their rights, as if you could make them a present of liberty… When your precious underprivileged really get together… oh, boy. That’s going to add up to something bigger than your privilege, then I don’t know what you’ll do. Sail away to a desert island, probably, and lord it over the monkeys.”

Leland recognizes the absurdity of a man who’s never had to work a day in his life appointing himself the defender of “the workingman.” With all the power at his command, Kane has crafted a compelling narrative, in which the people are victims and he’s their savior. But he can’t save them, because they’re not his to save. Sooner or later, Leland predicts, they’ll figure out they don’t need him. And then they’ll turn on him.

In the film, Mr. Ruffin stages a number of slapstick efforts to reach Bernard Arnault, the chairman and chief executive of LVMH, similar to the ways Mr. Moore tried to chase down Roger B. Smith of General Motors. . .

“Merci Patron!” follows Mr. Ruffin’s efforts on behalf of Jocelyne and Serge Klur, a couple in the northern town of Forest-en-Cambrésis who lost their jobs in 2007 with the closing of a factory that had been subcontracted to make suits for LVMH brands. Production was moved to Eastern Europe.

Mr. Ruffin coaches the Klurs, who are now destitute and whose home is threatened with foreclosure. Posing as their son, with dyed blond hair, he guides them on a quest to demand 35,000 euros, about $40,000, to settle their debts and to win a minimum-wage job for Mr. Klur from LVMH and Mr. Arnault.

Like this:

Good for Manhola Dargis [ht: bn]. She certainly does a much job reviewing La Loi du Marché (bizarrely rendered into the English-language version as The Measure of a Man) than Jordan Hoffman.

I especially appreciated her conclusion:

It’s too bad that the movie’s blunt original title — “La Loi du Marché,” or “Market Law” — was traded in for something prettier and blander. “The Measure of a Man” suggests stirring possibilities (“Of all things the measure is man,” as the philosopher once put it), but it doesn’t convey the ordinary cold brutality of what it means to be defined by the unpaid and the radically underpaid hour. Mr. Brizé, who wrote the script with Olivier Gorce, doesn’t break ground here. Yet, with Mr. Lindon’s help and in several extraordinary scenes in the market’s back office — a white hell in which people are pushed to sell out one another — Mr. Brizé transforms one individual’s story into a social tragedy.

That final comment on the movie is actually a perfect characterization of capitalism: it turns individual stories (whether of an unemployed worker or capitalists who make rational decisions not to reinvest the surplus they appropriate) into social tragedies.

That unemployed worker not only loses the ability to sell their ability to labor, in order to receive a wage that allows them to purchase the commodities they need to survive; their situation also imperils their psychological and physical health as all as that of their family, not to mention the economic and social health of the community in which they live. All are placed on a shakier footing because one worker who loses their job is often accompanied by many others in a similar situation within capitalism—whether because enterprises reorganize, industries collapse, or entire economies enter into recessions and depressions.

The same is true of capitalists: they often make individually rational decisions not to invest (because, for example, future expected profits are low, since wages might be rising or other businesses are slowing down). But, when they do, the workers they let go and the contractors from whom they were making purchases now can’t make their own purchases from still others and so on, thus multiplying the effects of the original decision. That’s how individually rational decisions can become social disasters.

In both cases, under capitalism, one individual’s story is transformed into a social tragedy.

I haven’t seen “Boom Bust Boom,” the recently released Monty Pythonesque documentary about capitalism’s periodic crises and the failures of mainstream economics.

However, I have read Andrew O’Heir’s [ht: ja] piece in which he argues the film “finds itself a little behind reality.”

It’s a curious development, and an index of how fast public perception and imagination have shifted. To most regular people in most parts of the world, the thesis that unfettered capitalism is unstable, empowers predatory behavior and worsens inequality is not merely uncontroversial but empirically obvious. We appear to be entering an era of political history when socialist or social-democratic reforms are once again in play. . .

it took more than 20 years after the Clinton-Blair rebranding of the electoral left (as, in effect, the squishier, friendlier right) for large swaths of the public to realize how thoroughly they’d been conned. Now Hillary and payday-lender BFF Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the rest of the compromised Democratic Party apparatus find themselves in a tough spot. . .

Of course Clinton is now walking back her decades-long support for heartless neoliberal policies of austerity, privatization and free trade. At least in the Democratic campaign, she has slid right past the friendly, center-left Keynesianism of “Boom Bust Boom” to position herself as the decaf Bernie, with more hardheaded practicality but only 20 percent less passion. I understand why she thinks that’s the right strategy; I don’t know whether she expects anyone to believe it.

I honestly can’t tell you why John Maynard Keynes, the father of interventionist macroeconomics and the intellectual avatar of the entire tradition embodied in “Boom Bust Boom,” is never mentioned by name. Have the right-wing attacks on Keynesianism since the Reagan-Thatcher years really rendered him untouchable? I do understand, more or less, why Karl Marx is not mentioned — although it’s time to get over that, for God’s sake.